User:Endaris/Easy Gift of Battle

An overly complicated guide to help you acquire a Gift of Battle with the lowest amount of WvW play time possible. A more accurate title might be "Convoluted methods to maximize your reward track gain".

Note that "Easy" is not the same as "Simple". This is complicated because it assumes you want to minimize the amount of time spent in WvW at all costs. But you can also just skip the steps you don't care about.

Preparing by not playing WvW

Preparation is very important thing for the WvW allergic player. And the earlier you start to prepare the better.

There is one thing you can do to make your Gift of Battle easier without playing WvW and that is raising your WvW Rank.

How does raising my WvW rank make Gift of Battles easier?

WvW currently has two types of Reward Tracks: WvW Reward Tracks and Skirmish Reward Tracks.

The WvW Reward Track progress is what you need for the Gift of Battle.

The Skirmish Reward Track progresses faster when you reach certain WvW rank thresholds, namely once you reach WvW rank 150 and a bit faster again at WvW rank 620. Why should you care? Because it rewards Instant Reward Track Progress on every single checkpoint.

Boring example math you don't care about

Each chest on the Skirmish Reward track has a certain `reward track points per pip` value that can be calculated by dividing the number of awarded reward track points by the total amount of pips required to finish the chest.

While you are on the Wood chest, each pip is effectively worth 12.5 reward track points.

While you are on the Bronze chest, each pip is effectively worth 18.75 reward track points.

While you are on the Silver chest, each pip is effectively worth 22.85 reward track points.

These values are assuming you can actually finish the entire chest so your mileage may vary but they point into the direction of the value.

Effectively you are looking at something similar to a permanent +8% reward track gain boost as a permanent account unlock once you reach WvW rank 150. And another at rank 620 although that is difficult to achieve without actually spending time in WvW.

Raising your WvW rank without playing WvW

1. Buy Boxes of WvW Supplies from gobblers

On average, 3 of these award close to one WvW rank.

Check the item page to see all the gobblers that have them in their rotation.

Gobblers rotate their items every day and only offer a small amount of items. So check these every day. Prioritize them over everything else. There is a T3 material bag for the same currency? Don't care, get the box. You can buy T3 mats for laurels, for gold, you can farm them in PvE. WvW rank cannot be farmed outside of WvW. I play WvW and I still get them so why wouldn't you?

2. Open Mist-Hardened Lockboxes

These can be bought on the trading post for a bit of silver and they can contain consumable items that grant you an average of 329 WXP per box according to drop rate research at the time of writing. So about 15 boxes for one WvW rank.

The bad news: You need to buy Mist-Hardened Lockbox Keys from Dugan to open them and for that you need WvW currencies.

The good news: Badges of Honor drop not just in WvW but also from every achievement point reward chest so you likely have a fair amount on hand already.

The other good news: Testimonies of Castoran Heroics drop from every WvW rank up chest. You can exchange these 1:1 for the Jade Heroic variant at the Heroics Notary so to some degree this is a self-feeding system. It is only enough for one key on average per rank up but hey, it's something.

The prices for these increase for every 5 keys you purchase per week. This purchase limit is your bottle neck for converting the currency you have. Make sure you buy at least 5 keys for Badges of Honor every single week. Do the math on how long it would take for your Badges of Honor to run out if you bought 10 every week instead. If you can last close to a year without running out of Badges, get 10, otherwise 5. It's not much, maybe 20 free WvW ranks per year but it piles up over time and it's just talking to a vendor instead of WvW!

3. Buy Taste of Instant World Experience from Dugan

In exchange for Emblem of the Avenger, WvW Skirmish Claim Ticket and Memory of Battle you can buy up to 6 WvW ranks per week. I know, you cannot have tickets nor emblems without ever having played the game mode. But if you came here in desperation because your last Gift of Battle was traumatic, you may have leftovers to utilize this option!

The main thing is really the emblem. If you are hesitant to spend tickets, remember that Skirmish Reward Tracks are the thing that give you tickets so by spending tickets it becomes easier to get tickets longterm. If you are hesitant to spend 10 Memories of Battle, remember that you would spend anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours to get a single WvW rank by actually playing the game mode so the gold spent on buying some from the trading post is well invested. You easily make it back by playing PvE for that time instead.

This is an actual decent option for players not allergic to WvW who are pushing for the next pip upgrades at rank 620 and 1395 respectively.

The vendor offers 2 different items, make sure you only go for the one that gives 5000 WXP. The other item only gives half that amount which is an okay option for people that kill more than 1000 players every week. But most people don't do that and even if you do more than 400 regularly, you want to keep emblems in reserve for weeks where you don't play WvW because you are likely in for the long haul and reaching even higher rank thresholds like Platinum aren't complete pipe dreams.

4. Maybe buy WXP Mini-Booster from Dugan

This boosts WXP gain when actually playing WvW so this is not immediately useful. The only reason I'm listing this is because this also has a weekly purchase limit and you can only purchase enough boosters for 2 hours uptime. That may not be enough for a week.

Just like the previous option this is more for the non-allergic people that don't have to look at every ticket as if it was the last they will ever obtain.

Preparing for actually playing WvW

Reward track gain can be accelerated significantly through the use of boosters. You may want to consider putting one character into WvW jail to maximize the use of boosters that are not readily available like the  Black Lion Boost or  Celebration Bonus and to make sure you have all relevant items on one character.

You can find a full overview of available reward track boosters here but I will relist the ones you should always have anyway.

Non-Consumables

 Incredibly Well Rested in a Comfy Home

If you have Janthir Wilds unlocked, just put your WvW jailed character into your homestead after leaving WvW every time to ensure this is always running.

 Guild WvW Reward Track Boost

Look for any max rank guild if you don't have any. Just ask in Lion's Arch, plenty of guilds that will just invite you with no requirements and you can get this buff by talking to the tavern dude. This even persists after you leave the guild you got this from.

WvW Reward Track Enrichment

Buy this from a laurel vendor in World versus World and slot it into your ascended Amulet.

Consumables

 Experience Booster

Obtained from Experience Booster, Candy Corn Gobbler or Heroic Booster.

The former are purchasable from Laurel vendors and you have absolutely no reason to ever walk around in WvW without this buff. If you would not have this effect otherwise, it is the single best purchase from the Laurel vendor with the following consideration:

In the worst of worlds you need to use 8 boosters to finish one reward track. Unless you're like WvW rank 10000 (and if you are, why are you reading this) this saves you more than 1h of playtime per reward track. The highest value you can get out of 8 laurels otherwise is like 7-8 gold at most. Most casual activities in GW2 easily get you that amount per hour. And we have not even considered the value of +50% WXP gain.

I mainly use the Candy Corn Gobbler but I still buy and carry the regular Experience Boosters with me cause I can use them to refresh the effect if it runs out while I'm in combat or I only notice it ran out right before a tick so I can just panic double click rather than bringing up a dialog and typing in numbers.

 Celebration Bonus

The boosters giving this are not readily available if you did not hoard them to begin with, making this a primary reason to put a character into WvW jail. A single Birthday Booster can last you for a while if you don't enter WvW often and it allows you to use the time to the fullest.

If your account is older and you are a hoarder you can probably also get by with just Celebration Boosters.

Ascended food

+10% WXP is great for the price. Just bulk craft once and then you have it prepared forever. No, it does not work on Consumables and Boxes of course.

It may not seem much but just like for most of the other things, your ways of cheapskating WXP gain are rather limited so even small boosts like this go a long way over time. If you have to play 50 hours to reach the next pip threshold and the food makes it 45.5h while costing you 25g over the total duration then that is not a bad deal. And you still actually benefit from the other food effects while playing!

Final Preparation

You have done it. Farmed free ranks in preparation, stacked all the boosters, items and effects on one character that is eagerly waiting in your homestead to jump into WvW.

Now it is time for the most drastic step: Change your Wizard's Vault preference to World versus World only. And wait for the Wizard's Vault dailies to refresh.

You may not actually want to do this on a Sunday unless you know you will be online between 00:00 and 07:30 UTC on Monday to change it back to PvE. You only need your dailies to be WvW, not your weeklies. The reason for this is the content of the Wizard's Vault Daily Completion Chest.

This chest awards 250 WvW Reward Track points per completed objective from the WvW category. That means you go into WvW, actually play, do the objectives (ideally all 4) and then when you accept the daily chest you get 750-1000 points which is equal to 10-15 minutes of WvW with full boosters or 25 minutes without. One thing to be careful about here is that it is possible to accept the daily chest while you still have one WvW daily open. The 250 points for that daily will not be applied retroactively so it is important that you wait with accepting it until finishing your session.

If you already play WvW, might as well take the freebies. All of these dailies besides the one for defeating enemy players are easy even for players inexperienced with player combat so there is essentially no risk of not completing the chest within a reasonable amount of time. Saving 10-15 minutes may not even sound like much but with some luck you may be able to complete 4 dailies within as little as 5-10 minutes and even when unlucky you can often complete 3 within 10 minutes.

Actually playing WvW

Short recap where the reward track progress comes from.

WvW is segmented in 2 hour skirmishes that start around uneven full hours in UTC time. Each of these skirmishes is segmented into 24 5-minute segments.

At the end of each of these 5-minute segments the timer on top of the screen changes to `--:--` and after a short delay you get:

• Pips for your Skirmish Reward Track if your Participation Level is at least 3
• WvW Reward Track progress according to your Participation Level

Which puts you in front of the first big problem, getting your participation level all the way up to 6 because that is when you gain +195 points for your reward track which acts as a base for all the bonus reward track gain from boosters and other stuff.

Getting Participation

There's no real way around this, you actually want to actively play the game mode until you hit level 6 and then you can slow down (a lot, depending on your preferences).

If you are on your own, the easiest way is to just capture sentries, recapture camps, kill enemy Dolyaks, escort your own Dolyaks, or defend objectives attacked by enemies, marked by white swords on the objective on the minimap. Just hitting an enemy player in the zone of the objective is usually enough to grant you participation to the defense event, even if you don't achieve anything and they kill you.

Once you got your participation to level 6 you want to keep it there forever! Participation only decays while you are in WvW. If you log out with maximum participation and 3:23 on the decay timer, it will be exactly that when you enter WvW the next time. Losing participation level significantly decreases your progress each tick so try your best to avoid being afk in WvW for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Leaving WvW

You're a clever person, so when you are done with dailies or want to leave, you will take a look at the tick timer. If it's close enough to 0, you just wait for the next reward before logging off. If it's more than 3 minutes, you would probably have to do another activity to refresh your participation so leaving right away can make sense.

Reentering WvW properly

This is only relevant if you already have your participation level up, that's why it's not at the start!

The tick timer for rewards is a mean thing that only gives you rewards if you have been on your current map for the full 5 minutes it took. Or if you switched to your current map from a different WvW map during the timer.

That means, to gain rewards on your first tick, you enter one map and then immediately switch to another.

In theory you can even push this further by leaving WvW after the tick reward to conserve your participation and then enter again 3 minutes later to conserve your participation without playing the game. Eventually you will need to do something to refresh your participation though. I don't recommend this because if you mistime it you are just wasting your time. See the next point for why.

Switching WvW maps

Often you may want to switch maps because there is a camp close to your spawn / keep that you feel you can safely capture for a participation refresh. Before you switch maps, make sure you check the tick timer. If you think you may not be able to load into the new map before rewards are handed out, wait until then.

If you are switching maps while the tick rewards are handed out you get nothing because you are not on a WvW map at the time. That's very annoying so keep a lookout for this.